Intelligent peripheral modules for microcontrollers

The modular concept of microcontroller design provides the means whereby each module can have it's own local microengine or state machine. The main CPU communicates with the modules through dual access memory, issuing commands to semi-intelligent state machines or writing directly to registers in the module. Once a module has been given a command sequence, the peripheral can act autonomously from the CPU. With several modules working at the same time, the effect of running multiple instructions per clock cycle can be obtained. In other words, a timer module can be performing some task while the CPU is executing an unrelated algorithm.